The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild
s the first large-scale study of three advanced web tracking mechanisms - canvas fingerprinting, evercookies and use of "cookie syncing" in conjunction with evercookies.
pinboarded
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
OnionShare
OnionShare is an open source tool that lets you securely and anonymously share a file of any size.
Wayfindr - Accessible Indoor Audio Navigation
Emerging indoor navigation technologies hold the key to a revolution in independent navigation for blind and partially sighted people. In order to achieve the greatest impact globally, we need to implement a consistent standard across wayfinding systems. This will truly open up a world where vision impaired people are no longer held back by their sight loss, removing barriers to employment, to meeting friends and family and engaging in their community. The internationally-recognised Wayfindr Open Standard does just that. Read on to learn more about how audio navigation works, how Wayfindr can help you understand how to deploy indoor navigation technology in your estate, and about our eLearning courses for audio navigation!
Building a digital garden
How I built myself a simple wiki using folders and files and published via Jekyll. The TL;DR is that I built a personal wiki out of files and folders and a few templates in Jekyll hosted on Github Pages. If you want to head straight to the wiki head here: tomcritchlow.com/wiki/ and if you want to skip straight to the technical how-to jump here
The Pudding
is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays.
Learning Library - WPCampus: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education
The WPCampus Learning Library is a growing collection of knowledge shared by members of the WPCampus community.
Digital Accessibility Teaching and Learning Resources
In partnership with the Government of Ontario, The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University is creating a series of practical online courses and interactive open textbooks aimed at raising awareness of digital accessibility, improving understanding and implementation of the requirements of Digital Accessibility, and contributing to a culture of inclusion around the world. Though there is some focus on The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), these courses and open textbooks will be relevant in many other jurisdictions that are also enacting laws much like those introduced in Ontario. These courses and textbooks are available to those who just want to understand how digital accessibility affects them personally, up to those who are looking to develop expertise with digital accessibility, and aiming to pursue it as a career.
Section 001
Rather than dedicating a Reclaim server to the 1200 students in a large intro class or building a multi-site, this project uses Google Sheets as a "free" database. This Google backend is tied to the lightweight, user-facing website by jQuery and can be hosted in GitHub pages, a couple of MB of Reclaim server space, or pretty much anywhere else. In our Domaians 19 presentation, we will help you to fork the Google Sheets and GitHub code running this project, so that you can have your own CMS monster to play with. We hope that in sharing our process and replicating the product, we can convince our monster to stop killing our loved ones (We'll miss you William).
What Martin Scorsese Can Teach Us About Motivated Camera Movement
t seems that in the 40 plus years since Martin Scorsese gave the cinema world Taxi Driver, the acclaimed director of other classic hits such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull and Gangs of New York continues to serve as both inspiration as well as aspiration for filmmakers trying to learn and emulate from the directing master. From his signature use of the roaming steadicam to his musical editing techniques, Scorsese’s directing exploits can teach a hungry filmmaker pretty much anything about the craft. In this latest video essay by #MovieGroovie on Youtube we get our next lesson in motivated camera movement and how it can make an actor’s performance shine.
The Six Main Stories, As Identified by a Computer - The Atlantic
A machine mapped the most frequently used emotional trajectories in fiction, and compared them with the ones readers like best.
Curatescape | A web and mobile app framework for curating the landscape
Curatescape offers a uniquely high-quality, low-cost model, perfect for small to medium-sized projects by scholars, non-profits, museums and others for whom cost is an issue.
Becoming: First-Gen and Latinx Experiences | Kenyon College Research | Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange
Digital Stories: First-Gen and Latinx Experiences centers on personal experience as a subject of analysis and as a means to facilitate the construction of new social knowledge. Students in the Contemporary Latino Literature and Film (SPAN 381) class captured, in digital story form, the experiences of first generation and/or Latinx students at Kenyon College and explored, together with Mount Vernon high school students in the Kenyon Academic Partnership (KAP) Spanish class, the themes of bilingualism, cultural contact zones, and nepantlismo (“the land in the middle”) through literature and digital stories. A primary teaching goal of this project was to decolonize the classroom and academic knowledge production. Using oral history, community-engaged learning, and digital storytelling, the students documented the role of radical resistance that first-generation and Latinx student played in the emergence and sustainability of their identities. Their digital stories engaged our campus community and beyond, as the College’s newspaper The Collegian documented.
How to block fingerprinting with Firefox | The Firefox Frontier
Fingerprinting is a type of online tracking that’s different from cookies or ordinary trackers. This digital fingerprint is created when a company makes a unique profile of your computer, software, add-ons, and even preferences. Your settings like the screen you use, the fonts installed on your computer, and even your choice of a web browser can all be used to create a fingerprint.
Everything You Need to Know About Captioned Videos | Meryl Evans
Born profoundly deaf, I’ve depended on captions since getting my first big clunky decoder in 1983. It was a box about the size of the older VHS and DVD players. Back then, captioned programs and movies were hard to find. Few things excited me more than seeing the caption symbol on the cover of a movie or at the start of a TV show. Thankfully, they’re easy to find when it comes to TV networks, streaming services, and movies. But the same can’t be said for the many, many videos companies and individuals put out on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and elsewhere. In recent years, captioning has gotten so much easier and more affordable. This guide will dive into why captioning matters, how it provides a huge ROI, 10 rules for creating great captions, and how to caption your videos.
Frequency 2156 - Post-Apocalyptic Internet Radio from the Future!
Frequency 2156 is a community based Internet radio from the post-apocalyptic future. Everyone alive and surviving can (and should!) publish radio messages. You can listen to the radio, which plays all the messages or you can browse a Message World Map for single messages from various locations. You can also send a request for a radio message to your fellow survivors all around the world. And of course, you can send your own radio message as well.
Soundation — Make music online
Soundation Studio is a powerful tool for creating music online. And even though we have always been trying to keep it as simple as possible it can seem a little scary for new users without prior experience in audio production. That is why we created the Learn section here on soundation.com. We try to cover as much as possible, and continuously add more.
Control Alt Achieve: 4 Free and Easy Audio Recording Tools for Google Slides
What are some easy ways to record audio? When using my Windows PC, I can use a free program such as Audacity, but many times our students will be using Chromebooks, so we need some web-based options. In this post we are going to take a look at four excellent, free options for recording audio right in your web browser
30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica
Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything. he application turns 32 later this summer, so with staff off we thought it was time to resurface this look at Hypercard's legacy. This piece originally ran on May 30, 2012 as Hypercard approached its 25th anniversary, and it appears unchanged below.
Sound Waves - LightNote
The basic physics of sound
Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software
When we hear the word "software," most of us think of things like Word, Powerpoint, or Photoshop, tools for individual users. These tools treat the computer as a box, a self-contained environment in which the user does things. Much of the current literature and practice of software design -- feature requirements, UI design, usability testing -- targets the individual user, functioning in isolation. And yet, when we poll users about what they actually do with their computers, some form of social interaction always tops the list -- conversation, collaboration, playing games, and so on. The practice of software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space. We have grown quite adept at designing interfaces and interactions between computers and machines, but our social tools -- the software the users actually use most often -- remain badly misfit to their task. Social interactions are far more complex and unpredictable than human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design. As a result, tools used daily by tens of millions are either ignored as design challenges, or treated as if the only possible site of improvement is the user-to-tool interface. The design gap between computer-as-box and computer-as-door persists because of a diminished conception of the user. The user of a piece of social software is not just a collection of individuals, but a group. Individual users take on roles that only make sense in groups: leader, follower, peacemaker, process nazi, and so on. There are also behaviors that can only occur in groups, from consensus building to social climbing. And yet, despite these obvious differences between personal and social behaviors, we have very little design practice that treats the group as an entity to be designed for. There is enormous value to be gotten in closing that gap, and it doesn't require complicated new tools. It just requires new ways of looking at old problems. Indeed, much of the most important work in social software has been technically simple but socially complex.
The Alchemy Web Site
Over 150 megabytes online of information on alchemy in all its facets. Divided into over 2400 sections and providing tens of thousands of pages of text, over 2500 images, over 240 complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material on alchemy. This site is organised by Adam McLean, the well known authority on alchemical texts and symbolism, author and publisher of over 50 books on alchemical and Hermetic ideas. Alchemy is a complex subject with many different interconnected aspects. Many people still only think of the quest of the philosophers' stone to change base metals into gold. On this web site you will be able to explore the riches of alchemical texts, some of which are wonderful works of allegorical literature, delve into its amazing, beautiful and enigmatic symbolism, and ponder its underlying hermetic philosophy, which holds a picture of the interconnection of the Macrocosm and Microcosm.
Take Back Your Web - Tantek Çelik on Vimeo
We used to control our online identities, content, and experience. We now share Twitter names instead of domains; even web developers tweet and post on Medium instead of their own sites. We scroll social media and feel empty instead of reading news & blogs to feel informed and connected. Algorithmic feeds amplify rage & conspiracies, enabling tribal ad-targeting to polarise and spread misinformation, threatening democracy itself. What happened? And what are we doing to fix it? That's a big question that will require all of us, our communities, our employers, to shift. I don't want to wait, and you probably don't either. What can you do for yourself, today? Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.
How to Convert Any HTML5 Template Into an Awesome WordPress Theme - WPMU DEV
What do you do when you can’t find the perfect WordPress theme? In all likelihood, you probably turn to a theme framework. However, every once in a while, you probably have this thought flit across your mind: “I should just code an HTML5 template and convert it into a WordPress theme.” But that’s just a pipe dream right? Let’s be realistic. The truth is, as long as you have some basic WordPress programming skills, converting an HTML5 template into a WordPress theme is within reach — provided you’re willing to put in the effort. In this post, I’ll show you how.
How We’re Using WordPress as a Headless CMS | Indigo Tree
The following is a transcript of the talk on Using WordPress as a Headless CMS, that developer Benjamin Read gave at WordCamp London 2018. The talk covered: 1. What is a headless (or decoupled) CMS 2. Why use WordPress as a headless CMS 3. Tools and process for building a headless site 4. A basic example and some gotchas we found 5. The Future is (probably) headless
PeppeR Project – PeppeR Project
The PeppeR Project is a research initiative dedicated to the design of educational software that fosters 21st century skills. The project’s core technology, called “PeppeR”, is a web-based collaborative workspace where students can engage in in-depth inquiry. PeppeR offers a variety of specialized knowledge building features and social networking tools that support learners of all ages in their efforts to share information, identify key ideas, and progressively work to improve those ideas. In doing so, PeppeR allows educators and instructional designers to customize the learning environment to their pedagogical or instructional preferences. Accordingly, tenets of flexible learning (ex. inform, engage, communicate, collaborate, curate, inform, assess) enable participants to optimize the educational experience. Finally, PeppeR is also an excellent collaborative workspace for researchers to design, develop, and implement new, cutting-edge features (ex. social media, gamification, peer assessment). Subsequently, researchers are able to utilize learning analytics on anonymous data to gauge the effectiveness of such newly implemented features, which are not readily available in typical LMSs.
Our Present as the Past’s Fictitious Future | Society for Cultural Anthropology
Much of technology’s material culture has developed as the realization of dreams from science-fiction narratives. Elon Musk, one of the foremost technology developers of our time, has stated that he is directly influenced by Iain Banks novels and by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the story of a man who tries to save the world by creating an alternate one. Martin Cooper, inventor of the mobile phone, was inspired by the Star Trek communicator, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg lists Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, a Lord of the Flies set in space, as one of his favorite books. Today’s technologies are both inspired by and based on these and other science-fiction stories. Inspiration is not a problem in itself, for imagination is important in innovation and the creation of technological productions. But this becomes problematic when those who are realizing these inspirations use the original stories as blueprints or manuals for developing technologies that they then build and deploy in our present time and context, with the expectation that they will work in the same way that they did in science fiction. Technological productions work in science fiction because they are imaginary, scripted in linear narrative paths. The technology used to create them may be based on pieces of functioning technology from the present, but it is imagined and described with as yet undeveloped capabilities, features, and degrees of acceptance. In science fiction, technology need not exist in any functional form. This sets up a dichotomy: science fiction is fictional science, but it can be perceived as a potential reality by those enthusiasts who are ensconced in building our technological future. The technology described in science fiction is shown to work in applied fictitious contexts. The real people who develop technologies based on their interpretations of what they extract from science-fiction stories seemingly take for granted that their productions will then work and fit into present culture. This is largely because that fictional technology had been shown to work in the visual and textual narratives that are their sources of inspiration.
The creeping threat of facial recognition
Facial recognition software is an innovation on the surveillance camera—which was deployed to solve a social problem. But only people, not technology, can solve social problems. People may have to apply technology to solve those problems, though, and therein lies the crux of our quandary: what technology is appropriate, and what is not, and what tools do we use, as Dr. Chowdhury and others ask, to form a “safe and healthy society”? Answers to that question are now being offered up without sufficient public input. Tools for face recognition that are broadly available and inexpensive, and used without regulation or transparency, are most concerning. Also, it is unknown whether short-staffed, budget conscious, or technologically-inexperienced police departments will adhere to the voluntary rules set forth by facial recognition software vendors.
Teaching an Inquiry Maths Problem - Conception of the good
In February 2018, I heard Andrew Blair speak at a CPD event about Inquiry Maths. Andrew is a Head of Maths and founder of his website Inquiry Maths where teachers can gain access to ideas about teaching Mathematics using the Inquiry Maths model. Andrew and I tend to disagree over the best pedagogical approach when teaching Mathematics, but we agree in teaching many of the problems that he has shared on his website. When I create resources, I check out different sites for ideas, and I regularly check Andrew’s website. It’s fantastic! When I saw Andrew speak at this CPD event, he showed a mathematical inquiry task that I made a mental note to include in my resourcing for the following year.
Ethical EdTech
Much of what passes for educational technology is designed for purposes of profit-seeking, surveillance of students, and user lock-in. Other kinds of technology exist, but they typically lack the marketing and sales budgets of competing vendors. This is a directory, created by and for higher-ed educators, for sharing tools and use-cases. We believe that education can be a critical site through which to transform the broader tech industry and the cultures surrounding it. What is Ethical EdTech? Ethical EdTech does not assume a perfect or universally agreed-upon set of digital tools or rules. Tools by themselves do not guarantee ethical pedagogy, and we do not deny that tools not included here can be used in ethical ways. Rather, we seek to point out tools that value user freedom, privacy, and control, so that these norms might become more easily within reach. Read more about our working guidelines here and suggest your own.